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My favourite music is the music I haven't yet heard. I don't hear the music I write: I write in order to hear the music I haven't yet heard.

John Cage

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John Cage
Age: 79 †
Born: 1912
Born: September 5
Died: 1992
Died: August 2
Composer
Illustrator
Music Theorist
Musician
Musicologist
Painter
Philosopher
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
LA
California
John Milton Cage Jr.
John Milton Cage
Jr.
John Milton
Jr. Cage
J. C.
Music
Writing
Favourite
Havens
Haven
Hear
Heard
Write
Order

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Music is edifying, for from time to time it sets the soul in operation.
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As McLuhan says, everything happens at once.
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Art is whatever you can get away with.
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All great art is a form of complaint
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Food, one assumes, provides nourishment but Americans eat it fully aware that small amounts of poison have been added to improve its appearance and delay its putrefaction.
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Beware of losing what isn't in your head.
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When you start working, everybody is in your studio- the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas- all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.
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The Indians long ago knew that music was going on permanently and that hearing it was like looking out a window at a landscape which didn't stop when one turned away.
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The attitude I take is that everyday life is more interesting than forms of celebration, when we become aware of it. That when is when our intentions go down to zero. Then suddenly you notice that the world is magical.
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The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing.
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We need not destroy the past. It is gone.
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One shouldn't go to the woods looking for something, but rather to see what is there.
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We only hear what we listen for.
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Music is a means of rapid transportation.
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Art's purpose is to sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens.
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An error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality.
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If this word music is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.
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There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
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Why do you not do as I do? Letting go of your thoughts as though they were the cold ashes of a long dead fire?
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Look at everything. Don't close your eyes to the world around you. Look and become curious and interested in what there is to see.
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